“Gone? Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Just that. Out of my hands and on their way to those who can put a stop to this before you destroy two nations in the name of avarice.”
A cry tore through the room, guttural and animalistic. Light flashed on something metallic as her uncle charged into view, the gleaming length held before him. Still, she had no idea what he wielded until she saw the silver stained red.
She pressed her hands to her mouth to hold back the scream, hold back the horror, but it didn’t help. Uncle still hissed words of hatred. Papa still staggered back, away from the blade. Then he crumpled and fell.
Gates followed him down, muttering, “You couldn’t have, not yet. You must have it.” His hands shoved into Papa’s jacket and searched.
Papa, fight back! But he didn’t. He gasped, seemed to struggle for a moment, and then went lax. No. No, no, no, no, no!
Did she bleed too? She must. She couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t be. Not anymore.
When Papa’s head lolled to the side, he blinked and his gaze focused on her. There was life yet in those familiar depths, but it flickered. Sputtered. “Gwyneth.”
She didn’t hear it. She just saw the movement of his lips. But her uncle, tossing Papa’s case of calling cards into the wall, snarled. “Now you worry about your darling daughter? Oh, have no fear, Fairchild. Dear Uncle Gates will take care of our precious girl.”
Bile burned her throat.
Papa blinked again as he tried to pull in a breath that choked him. Again his gaze sharpened, caught hers. This time when his lips moved, he made no sound whatsoever. Run!
Then it was gone, all the light in his eyes. Extinguished like a flame left before an open window.
And she ran. She turned on silent slippers and fled back around the corner and down the hall. Out the doors and straight into the waiting carriage.
“Gwyneth? Miss Fairchild?”
All she noted of the voice was that it wasn’t Uncle Gates’s. Nothing else mattered. Seeing that the Wesleys were already seated, their eyes now wide, Gwyneth pulled the door shut herself. “Go!”
An eternal second later, the driver’s “Yah!” reached her ears, and the carriage jolted forward.
When she closed her eyes, all she could see was darkness yawning before her.
Two
Baltimore, Maryland
10 May 1814
Ah, bah.”
Thaddeus Lane watched as the teetering Johnson stood, sending a snarl at Smitty, seated across from him. Thad was glad he stood well out of range of the sure-to-be-foul exhalation of breath.
“Them British won’t waste their time in the Chesapeake.”
Smitty’s face mottled red. “They won’t, eh? What of the atrocity at Hampton?”
Johnson hiccupped. “Years ago. I say that…that…I say if Mr. President don’t care, why should we?” He turned in a slow, wobbling circle, confusion on his brow. “Where’d I put me hat?”
Thad pushed off from the wall and scooped up from the floor a filthy bit of felt. With a grin, he jammed it onto the man’s head. “There you are, Johnson.”
The inebriated sailor gave him a gap-toothed smile. “Bless you, young Lane. You’re a good one, you are.”
Smitty scowled and thunked his mug onto the table, sloshing ale. “Lane, tell him. Tell him we ought to take the threat seriously.”
“Yeah, Laney, tell him it’s nothin’.”
Thad grinned at one sot and the other. Sometimes he picked up a few gems of information from these ale-soaked tongues, and sometimes he just got caught in their foxed arguments.
The door swung open, and relief surged through him when his oldest friend stepped into the dank tavern. With brows raised, Thad moved his hand down in front of his torso, thumb up, then away from his body, palm out. Anything?
Alain Arnaud shook his head. Ah, well. Thad smiled and refocused on Smitty’s question. “I think if Arnaud’s dear Napoleon had taken care of the Redcoats as he ought to have, we wouldn’t have to worry about it at all.”
Arnaud scowled in that way that made it obvious, even more than his dark Bourbon looks, that he’d been born an aristocrat. “My Napoleon? I have not stepped foot in France since I was five, but he is my Napoleon?”
“See?” Smitty wiped a grubby sleeve over his mouth. “He be worried. And if Thaddeus Lane be worried…”
“He ain’t worried. And if Thaddeus Lane ain’t worried…”
Thad chuckled and clapped a hand to Arnaud’s shoulder to push him back out the door. “Let us leave them to their quarrel, shall we?”